Using the 5Ws Framework: What

Let’s take a look at how to use the “what” of the 5Ws framework to define problems and gather requirements for a digital transformation initiative.

For starters, what are the constraints that the organization faces to develop a feature or execute this project?

• People

• Business processes

• Technology & systems

• Financial

• Legal & regulatory

Equally as important, what are the stakes associated with this initiative?

• High: existential to the team or organization, physical safety, lots of downside risk

• Medium: recoverable if it fails, mitigable risk

• Low: experimental with low to no risk of impact

Once those are established, it’s time to think about how to measure progress and set metrics for goal setting. What are the quantitative and qualitative factors to consider?

Extending from business processes constraints, what are the different states of the process?

• Prerequisites to start

• Points to initiate the process

• Supporting intermediate states vs. requiring end-to-end in one shot

• Perspectives from different stakeholders as process is executing

Technology and systems constraints expand into multiple topics as well.

What types of systems are involved?

• Owned vs. licensed (e.g. SaaS)

• Cloud vs. on-premises

• Current vs. new (i.e. newly or needs to be procured)

For each of those systems, what layers will our project or initiative be touching?

• User interface (UIs)

• Programmatic interfaces (APIs)

• Databases

• Infrastructure & network

If there is data involved (which there likely is), there are a handful of topics that each have a can of worms:

• Shape: what does the data look like (i.e. formats), its flexibility to have the same data represented different (e.g. columns are reordered), and its staticity (i.e. will the shape evolve over time)?

• Permissions: what are the visibility and edibility requirements by different stakeholder groups or people?

• Exceptions: what possible errors or exceptions exist and what does that data look like?

• Volumes: what are the volumes per transaction and over many transactions per day, month, or year?

• Importance: what are the logging, retention, and deletion requirements?

Finally, what is the breadth and depth of this initiative (i.e. is it intended to solve one or multiple use cases)?

TLDR: Ask what questions as a starting point to discover constraints, stakes, and metrics, then dive further into people, processes, and systems.